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Book Review
| Forging a Common Bond: Labor and Environmental Activism during the BASF Lockout. By Timothy J. Minchin. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. 233 pp. Illustrations, bibliography. $55.00 Cloth.
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| During the past one hundred years, multinational corporations have experienced two threats to their hegemony: unionism and environmentalism. Traditionally, however, these two movements confronted the corporate world separately, often with opposing viewpoints and goals. With Forging a Common Bond, Timothy Minchin reveals a shift in this dichotomy and delineates the creation of an alliance among unionists and environmentalists for common goals. This revelation marks a shift in both labor and environmental history, making this volume in the New Perspectives on the History of the South a timely contribution. |
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Minchin tells of an epic battle from 1984 to 1989 between the German-owned Badische Anilin and Soda-Fabrik (BASF) and the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Worker's International Union (OCAW) over operation of BASF's chemical plant at Geismar, Louisiana. Minchin recounts the five-year lockout and introduces the players who are obvious—corporate executives and labor leaders—and those less obvious—the workers' mothers and girlfriends, the German union I. G. Chemie, African American residents, public relations gurus, and a collage of environmentalists. |
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The participation of this myriad of players illustrates the decline in traditional corporate fatalism in the face of environmental regulations, a wedge issue between workers, who often suffered in toxic working environments, and environmentalists, whose movement corporate leaders claimed threatened jobs and economic security. Corporate gloom-and-doom tactics, used throughout the smokestack industry in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, kept the two movements at odds. The tide turned in the 1980s at the BASF plant when public health officials began to publicize the environmental catastrophe in the Mississippi River corridor (dubbed by the labor-environment coalition, the "Bhopal on the Bayou" in a comparison to a deadly chemical-company disaster in India). Workers and residents faced the worrisome reality of far higher-than-normal cancer rates, and were now willing to ally with environmentalists. |
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Minchin shows how the public relations war early on favored BASF. President Ronald Reagan's firing of the air-traffic controllers and a strong right-to-work movement in the South helped convince some OCAW members initially to distrust environmentalists. But as time passed and workers and their families suffered the consequences of the lockout, old beliefs gave way to new realities—no income and knowledge of the troublesome toxic dangers of the chemical industry. In the end, OCAW's sophisticated public relations campaign outmaneuvered BASF's by introducing the public to the corporation's links to Nazi Germany, the Bhopal disaster, and a disregard for African American residents who lived in the polluted community and who were often overlooked for the company's higher paying jobs. |
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At the end of the protracted disagreement the OCAW and its allies won. The workers went back to work in late 1989, African Americans gained access to employment and cleaner neighborhoods, BASF spent millions in remediation of the industrial landscape and for implementation of cleaner technology, the state kept vigilant watch. "Cancer Alley" spawned an alliance between unionists and environmentalists that reverberated throughout the state and the BASF-OCAW confrontation became a rallying point for other industrial workers in United States. Unfortunately, this bilateral threat to corporate hegemony has inspired American companies to export jobs to nations with limited environmental regulations and cheap labor. |
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Despite these pitfalls, Minchin concludes that there is hope for American labor in the twenty-first century through the proliferation of labor-environment alliances. He also makes a convincing case for the ongoing need to examine the corporation-worker dichotomy in a "post-industrial" world that is still dependent on smokestack industries. |
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Minchin's story-telling skills, clear writing style, and agility in deconstructing complex personalities and events facilitates an understanding of the relationship of BASF to the labor-environment coalition at the end of the twentieth century. Forging a Common Bond is a must-read for labor historians and is highly recommended for environmental historians interested in the relationship of industry to humans and the environment. |
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Christopher J. Huggard is an associate professor of history at Northwest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville, Arkansas. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on the history of mining and the environment and is co-editor/author of Forests Under Fire: A Century of Ecosystem Mismanagement in the Southwest (University of Arizona Press, 2001). |
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